On Oct 19, 2011, at 03:41 PM, "Jaroslav Kalinovski
kofeinu:+:hotmail.com" <owner-chemistry_._ccl.net>
wrote:
Sent to CCL by: Jaroslav Kalinovski [kofeinu-$-hotmail.com]
Hi,
I really do not understand... for me, the source code I am writing is like an
equipment in the laboratory. Do you really need someone else equipment to make a
proper review? Maybe in this case it is easy to send the code but rules are the
same. Do you ask for particle accelerator when reviewing paper about experiment
with one?
If someone is having troubles with reproducing my results, one always can write
to me and simply ask for the code but I do not feel I HAVE TO publish code
explicitly. In the end it is my property, I can describe algorithm, points of
theory but why should I give the code? No one is watching at the hands of
experimentalists while reviewing their papers.
I think people are forgetting that code is just a tool not a research
result.
It is true that relying only on reputation is not the perfect way but it works
for other disciplines. In the end we always have to put on some trust in
authors.
That is all for me.
Best regards,
J.Kalinowski
And
that's exactly it, you don't have to publish your source code, but you should be
prepared to let someone look over it if they ask.
Also you don't
have to let them use it, you can protect that by copyright, but people should be
able to look over it and satisfy themselves that it should do what you say it
will. The right to look should be free, the right to run or license the
code can be whatever you think the market can
bear.
The call for openness is in the context of
devising code to analyze large data sets in the context of climate change. In
this context we should not be comfortable with a researcher telling us that they
wrote a program to extract the key data, who then asserts that they wont let us
see how it works.
I don't expect a reviewer
to check the code implementation of every computational development that apears,
this would be a very onerous task, and would not be realistic. However if a
problem arises where a number of programs claim to be calculating the same
thing, but get different results, then I think the scientific community would be
best served if they knew that the source code was available for their
perusal.
There may be a case for certain
restrictions to apply, but these restrictions and limitations should be clearly
flagged in any resulting scientific papers. A very hypothetical example of
this might be where a researcher was working for a pharmaceutical company which
had developed proprietary software for developing leads in drug discovery. If
the researcher wished to pubish details of research in which a number of
potential drug candidates had been developed by applying the software to orphan
drug discovery, without giving details of precisely how they had been developed
then it might be appropriate to flag this and publish the leads as a matter of
public interest.
One final point, open access to
your code does allow ones rivals to see what and how you have written it, but it
also allows you to examine their code and identify cases where they have stolen
your IP.
All the
best